Phantom

Description

Tech in her veins. Anarchy in her blood. In the City, they have it all - sunlight, a corp job, a corpbloc home miles above the poisoned earth below. Four-hundred storeys down, in the darkness of the undercity slums, lives sixteen-year-old orphan Nova. Nova is a hacker. Aided by the program Phantom, she can sneak up to the City, leech what she needs and sink back down again, invisible as a ghost.But Nova has caught someone's eye, and that's Phantom-creator and legendary anti-corp hacker the Moth. Now the Moth has a job for Nova. A job that will send her miles into the sky. To bring the City crashing down. *** An explosive futuristic fantasy from the author of Thirteen Days of Midnight, shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Award.

Leo Hunt was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1991. He grew up around books, and his mother's job at Seven Stories in Newcastle left a strong impression on his choice of career. He realised he wanted to either be an author or an archeologist - but when he learned that archaeologists didn't unearth piles of perfectly preserved dinosaur bones every time they put a spade in the ground, he decided on the former. Leo started writing Thirteen Days of Midnight when he was 19, in his first year at the University of East Anglia. He graduated in 2014 with a First Class Honours degree in American Literature and Creative Writing. He currently lives in London.

An exciting speculative thriller with plenty of plot twists and some cool tech that you won't find elsewhere. Sentient AIs, a world post water wars, a courageous but reckless central character come together to offer a satisfying and pacy read. * The Bookbag * Set in a distorted future, Leo Hunt's compelling Phantom is a hi-tech dystopian thriller that slaloms effortlessly around the genre's cliches while paying tribute to its titans * The Guardian * Phantom is a well-thought out YA sci-fi thriller with strong world-building and interesting characters. There's a fascinating moral dimension to the concepts of high-end artificial intelligence that's central to the plot, but despite all the futuristic elements, Phantom remains firmly grounded in an all too believable world. -- Linda Wilson * Crime Review * Set in a distorted future, Leo Hunt's compelling Phantom is a hi-tech dystopian thriller that slaloms effortlessly around the genre's cliches while paying tribute to its titans * The Guardian *